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The Edgar Wilson Award

IAUC 6936 announced the
establishment of an award for amateur comet discoverers. Each Award is
composed of a monetary award from the Edgar Wilson Charitable Trust
Fund and an Award plaque (sample photographs via links below). The Award is
allocated annually among the amateur astronomers who, using amateur equipment,
have discovered one or more new comets. Only comets
officially named for
their discoverers shall be included in the annual count. Since particular
recognition is to be given to the amateurs who discover the most comets,
identical fractions of the total Award funds are allocated for each comet
with an eligible discoverer, except that if the same comet is credited to
more than one independent eligible discoverer, each discoverer
shall receive a full fraction. If the discovery is made as the result of
information produced or prepared by some other person, it shall not
qualify for consideration. Eligible discoveries may be made by visual,
photographic or electronic means.

The Award is administered by the
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), as the beneficiary under the
Will of Edgar Wilson of Lexington, KY. This administration shall specifically
be through the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Central Bureau for
Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT), which, with the advice of the Committee on
Small Body Nomenclature (CSBN; formerly the Small Bodies Names Committee)
of IAU Division III, has the responsibility for naming comets.

The funds available for the first annual Award amounted to
approximately US$20000 (twenty thousand dollars), as a total amount
to be split among the award winners for that year; in the years since
the first Award, the amount of money available has oscillated considerably,
usually below, but sometimes above, the first-year amount
(evidently due to the investment policies of the bank trustees, which
are kept confidential). For the purpose of this Award, the Award year
is the period of twelve months beginning and ending on June 11.0 UT.
The first Award was for the year ending on 1999 June 11.0. The Award
is usually announced within a month after the end of each Award year.

To be eligible for the Award an individual must demonstrate:

that he or she is acting in an amateur capacity, at least for the
purpose of discovering the comet, and

that only amateur, privately-owned equipment was used for the discovery.

In years when there are no eligible
comet discoverers, the Award shall be made instead to the amateur astronomer(s)
judged by the CBAT to have made the greatest contribution toward promoting
an interest in the study of comets.

SAO employees associated with the CBAT, CSBN members, as well as members of
their immediate families, are not eligible for the Award.

The Edgar Wilson Award is international in scope, and
nationals of no country are excluded from consideration. An observer who
suspects he or she has discovered a comet shall ensure that his or her
discovery report reaches the CBAT
according to the usual procedures. The CBAT
shall maintain the necessary records and may contact the discoverers for
eligibility documentation.

The decision of SAO (via the CBAT) is final and takes precedence over
the description on this page.

Hypothetical Example

A rather contrived example shows most of the probable situations that
can arise. In the year 2028, there were 13 discoveries of new comets:

C/2028 C1 (Papathanassiou); professional with professional telescope

C/2028 F1 (Oldfield); amateur

P/2028 F2 (Lennon-McCartney); two independent amateurs

C/2028 G1 (Harrison-Starr); two amateurs working together

P/2028 K1 (SONOFLINEAR); professional

C/2028 L1 (Papathanassiou); naked-eye discovery by professional in
an entirely amateur capacity

As an experiment, we used
Digital's AltaVista
translation service to produce initial versions of the bulk of this
webpage in French
[cleaned up by Alain
Maury], German
[cleaned up by Maik Meyer],
Italian
[cleaned up by Mauro V. Zanotta] and
Spanish
[cleaned up by Federico Fdez.
Pardavila]. Also, Alexandre Amorim (Florianopolis, Brazil) has kindly
posted this webpage
at his
website in Portuguese.
Our thanks to those translators named above. In cases where the
translations differ in meaning from the English version, the English version
takes precedence.

This webpage was updated on 2007 Sept. 24 (foreign-language
translations not updated yet; they were based on an early version of
this webpage that was written around the time of the first Award in
1999) and 2017 May 11.